"He needs help," Ruth said. "I can tell by the tone of his voice."
"Yes," I said. "We'd better get there quickly."
The circus was at that time in winter quarters at Texarkana, Texas. In another month the second-season tour would be starting. We had heard from Tom frequently during the first season, but he had carefully kept his difficulties hidden from us. We were aware, however, that he was going through the hardest period of his life.
In San Angelo he tried to be light about his hard luck.
"We had a little bad luck the first season," he said, smiling bravely, "but this year it's going to be different."
Actually he had had a great deal of misfortune that first season. Though his circus had played to capacity crowds once the first dreadful bouts with the weather were over, Tom was not able to make up the losses he had sustained during the first few weeks of the season.
There were factors other than the weather that contributed to his losses too. There was an epidemic among the animals, for instance, that destroyed a number of valuable horses and an elephant. One of the aerialists fell during the act, too, and was subjected to a spinal injury that incapacitated him permanently for circus work after that. Tom gave this man a large sum of money to cover his medical expenses and living costs until he could find some other means of making a living.
By the time the first season ended he had used all his capital. The big house in Beverly Hills had long been gone-and the yacht and string of Rolls Royce He was literally a poor man despite the millions he had made as the highest paid star of the screen. He had negotiated a loan to carry the circus through winter quarters, and was beginning the second season under the duress of heavy debt.
Still, he didn't reveal to us the extent of his trouble during our talk in San Angelo. He was still looking forward to the future with courage.
"I think we've got a better show than last season's set up for this year," he said. He looked at Ruth and smiled wistfully. "But I can think of a way it can be made even better."
"Dad, if I can help-" Ruth began.
They both looked at me. Of course I hated to see Ruth go, especially since I wasn't fully recovered from my accident; but I knew how important this was to both Tom and Ruth.
I smiled. "What are we waiting for?" I said. "There are lots of plans to be made, aren't there? "
The tension seemed to ebb out of him right away. For the rest of the meal, while we made our plans, he seemed almost like the Tom Mix of the old happy days. But not quite. The old Tom Mix was really gone for good. Too many troubles had scarred him.
The following month was one of the happiest for Tom that he had spent in years. He and Ruth went to California where they perfected the routine they later performed together in the show. They worked long hours together every day and Ruth wrote me that his physical endurance was as awe-inspiring as ever, though he was in his late fifties by then.
Tom and Ruth returned to Texarkana just before the season was to start. With her at his side, Tom's spirits were substantially raised. His pep talk to his crew and performers was full of the old fire and hope.
And the first few weeks of the second season went well. The circus played to big crowds and Tom made enough money to meet expenses and begin to retire the heavy financial obligation he had undertaken. He continued to refuse financial help from me, for he knew that the foundation of his circus venture was still undeniably shaky. I did, however, buy Ruth her car and trailer in an effort to do something to help.
I was well enough by the time the show reached Austin, Texas, to go to see it. I had worried that perhaps Tom's financial troubles might affect his performances, but my fear was groundless. He was more brilliant than ever. His flash, fire and unexcelled physical aura dazzled the thousands of persons who came to see him wherever the circus played.
Perhaps he couldn't have done it that year if Ruth had not been with him. She was an integral part of his act, and his stature seemed to grow to even larger dimensions than usual when she was at his side. He performed all his marvelous tricks with even more agility and dash than before and he and Ruth, as a team, performed some new riding, shooting, and roping tricks that had the fans stamping and cheering.
I was thrilled for them. And at that moment I lost temporarily some of the ominous doubts I had felt about his circus venture.
At dinner that night I was cheerfully candid about it. "You have a brilliant show," I said, "and I'm sure you are going to come through on it this year."
Tom looked at Ruth and grinned. "Sure we are,"' he said. "All we need is a few good breaks this year."
It was a while before the breaks turned bad. There was no weather trouble at first. The fans turned out for the circus in droves. Naturally this good luck caused a regrowth of Tom's confidence in himself. It was evident that his immense popularity with his fans was still undiminished. Everywhere his circus played he had reunions with his old friends. Invariably he would honor these old friends by asking them to ride in the grand entry with Ruth and himself.
Colonel William Sterling, then Adjutant General of Texas, was a man so honored one day. Bill and Tom were old friends from the days when Tom had served in various capacities of law-enforcement work in the West. It was a very hot day. When Bill rode to town-his ranch was close to San Antonio, where the circus was playing that day-he dismounted at the show grounds and unsaddled the black-and-white quarter horse he was riding. The heat had caused the horse to sweat and some of the red coloring from the saddle blanket had run and clung to the horse.
"I don't think the heat did that at all," Tom said, laughing. "I think you're too big for that little horse, Bill. I think you pressed that coloring right into him."
Bill Sterling, being six feet four, did rather dwarf his horse.
Quarter horses are never very tall, and Bill's was no exception.
"You know, Bill," Tom laughed, "we can't have you riding that horse in the grand entry. I'm afraid your feet might drag on the ground! "
Tom insisted that Bill ride the beautiful black colt he had been training as a substitute for his own mount, Warrior. The colt was named Crow and he was a good seventeen hands tall. Colonel Sterling made an imposing sight on him in the grand entry. After the performance was over Tom made a gift of the horse to him.
"But I can't accept this horse," Colonel Sterling said. "Why, you've been training him for yourself."
"I've been training him for you," Tom said. "I've been figuring you'd be needing a new mount about now."
The Colonel had hundreds of horses on his ranch, and Tom certainly couldn't afford to part with a valuable animal like Crow at that time, but he wanted to make a gift to the Colonel.
Shortly after that afternoon, however, the bottom began to fall out of things again.
Business had been good. Tom had been steadily reducing the load of debt he was carrying and had begun to carry fresh hope inside him.
Then one day when the circus was playing at Auburn, California, a harbinger of disaster took hold in Tom's mind. That day he was very ill. He had been hospitalized countless times in his life for injuries and wounds sustained in his war adventures, law-enforcement work, and movie-making activities, but his inordinately robust health had always kept him safe from most of the ordinary illnesses of the body.
He wasn't safe from nerves. When Ruth stopped at his trailer a few minutes before the performance was to begin, she found him blanched and shaking.
He tried to smile. "Just a case of the jumps," he said. "Will you take the show for me today, Ruth? "
"We'll call the show off," Ruth said, her alarm growing rapidly. She had never seen her father this way before. No one else ever saw him that way.
"If you can just get the show started," he said, "maybe I can go on later."
"Dad, you need a doctor," Ruth said, anxiously. "We've got to call the show off. I couldn't take your place."
Although he was shaking so hard he could scarcely stand up, Tom gripped her shoulders. "There has to be a Mix out there today, Ruth. We've never let them down yet, have we?"
Ruth was crying and feverish with worry when she left Tom to rush out to ask the advice of Johnny Agee.
"You look just like your father," he told her.
"You mean- that I should go out there and- ?"
"Come on," he said. "Let's stick that long hair of yours under your hat."
Ruth in later years often told of making her entry on the great gelding, Warrior... how scared she was when the music started and she rode into the big tent. But she got away with it! Apparently the audience thought they were seeing the real Tom Mix. Fortunately Tom recovered sufficiently to do his many stunts.
Another disaster was waiting at a small city in Montana. The circus moved into town and made the usual preparations to set up for the performances. The circus lot was already overrun with youngsters clamoring for Tom's autograph when a couple of town officials arrived to see him.
It was a tough town. The officials looked as though they belonged there. They elbowed their way through the group of youngsters that were crowding around Tom.
"Gotta see you," one of them told Tom curtly.
Tom tried to be gracious. "Sure," he said, "but there's some work to be finished first."
By the time Tom finished the autographs and did a few lasso tricks for his eager young fans, the two officials were fidgeting impatiently.
"All right," Tom said. "What can I do for you men?
"Just this," said one of them. "We want two hundred complimentary tickets for town officials and their families and friends. It's the custom around here when a show comes to town." The man's eyes narrowed. "In fact, it's a kind of law."
Tom smiled. "Sounds like a funny law to me. Seems as if the town officials, who have jobs, at least could afford to buy tickets for their families and friends." He kept right on smiling. "You see, we keep our admission charge as low as possible so as many persons as possible can see the show. We have a law too. Our complimentary tickets go to underprivileged children and to charitable organizations."
"I'd advise you to change your rule in this case," the official said with an ugly grimace.
"Sorry," said Tom, still smiling.
"Can't guarantee your show'll be very safe," the man said.
Tom shrugged and turned away from the man. He could not be coerced or intimidated. He could not violate his principles of right and wrong in any circumstances.
That night, an hour before the performance was due to begin, the "wrecking crew" arrived, led by the two men who had approached Tom that morning. Their angry followers were other "officials" and a group of hoboes they had rallied behind them. It was a mob at work, a mob frenzied by all the taut emotionalism attendant on the Depression.
Tom and his circus crew fought valiantly in one of the biggest mass fist fights of all time. They were soon overwhelmed by sheer force of number. The mob ripped the big tent and tore it down. Trailers and cars were overturned and wrecked, In the violence, several valuable horses were killed, and a number of Tom's men were severely injured.
It was all over very quickly. What a few minutes before had been a color-flamed invitation to excitement and entertainment was now the ruin of a dream. It was as if a gigantic scythe had passed over the circus grounds, destroying everything with one titanic sweep.
Tom and Ruth were up all night helping the injured. There were a number of bruised and cut bodies, but fortunately none of the circus crew were so seriously hurt that the circus couldn't move out of town the next morning.
A great amount of equipment had been wrecked beyond salvage. What was still usable or repairable was loaded into the vehicles that hadn't been destroyed, and the circus left town at dawn.
Just before they pulled out, Tom gathered the discouraged circus personnel together.
"We'll build the show again," he said firmly. "We've got to do it- and we will do it."
There was one more bitter piece of luck to endure before they reached the next town on their schedule. A truck pulling a trailerful of horses went out of control on a mountain road and plunged into a ravine, killing several horses and injuring the driver badly. The total loss from the whole misfortune was fantastic. Most people would have given up. But not Tom.
Up until that night he had succeeded in reducing substantially the heavy debt he had been carrying. With the mob disaster, he was forced to assume new and even heavier obligations to get started again.
Everyone worked hard to repair the damages and Tom, on the basis of his good name and reputation for honesty, got quick financing for some new equipment. The circus was ready to resume its schedule within three weeks, but the losses alone from the failure to meet playing dates during the idle period were enormous.
For a long time after that, things went along on a slow uphill grade again. The killing blow was yet to come.
It was a beautiful day. Spring had come unseasonably early to Neenah, Wisconsin. There was a bright sun and a rash of new spring hats. The town was abuzz with excitement, not only over this brash burgeoning of spring, but also because the Tom Mix Circus had just hit town.
The day wore by in warm gentleness. The air seemed to be thick and sultry. No one was aware that the unusual blandness was a black harbinger of what was to befall that evening.
The rain started just after the performance began. It started with gentle brushing at first, and the audience that packed the tent was hardly aware that it was raining at all.
Tom and Ruth had made their triumphant exit from their first act and had gone to their trailers to change for the next act. Ruth was hurrying to Tom's trailer with a scarf she had washed for him when the wind struck. It came scurrying through the grounds like a preliminary whip crack at first and then, suddenly, it crashed upon them-a violent crash between warm air and cold, a tornado!
Ruth was practically blown into Tom's trailer.
"The animals! " Tom shouted over the scream of wind. "Cut them loose and then come to the big tent."
Ruth beat against the wind, thinking she was going to be ripped apart, but she finally reached the tent where the animals- the llamas, zebras, shetland ponies, and horses- were stabled and tied. She and some of the circus crew worked frantically to get the animals freed before their tent sagged and crashed down under the heavy force of wind and the lash of rain.
By the time Ruth had reached the big performance tent, it had partly collapsed. The interior equipment was fortunately too large to allow a complete collapse, but the crowd was swept with hysteria and was milling around helplessly despite Tom's desperate attempts, from his station in the center ring, to empty the tent with a semblance of order. He stood there trying to allay fear, but the feeling of panic was infectious and the exits were soon jammed by a frantic mob that could move neither forward nor backward. The melee was made all the more uncontrollable by the horses and elephants, which were in the center ring when the storm struck and which, too, were milling around in fright among the yelling crowd.
The fire department arrived and cut long rents in the tent in an effort to get the people out.
The tornado abated as swiftly as it had begun. Suddenly there was no wind, only a light, cold drizzle. Gradually, with Tom's persuasive voice over the loud-speaker helping matters considerably, the tent was emptied in a reasonably ordered manner. Miraculously there were few spectators seriously injured.
Instead of brooding over the financial ruin the tornado disaster had brought him, Tom spent most of the rest of the night helping a woman look for her child, who had been lost in the stampede of the crowd. Near dawn the child was found wandering in a field.
He came back to the circus grounds to face a dejected circus crew. In his moment of great loss he said something typical of him: "We have everything to be thankful for. No lives were lost and no one was badly injured. Now let's get to work."
They all got to work, Tom included, sewing up the tent rents and repairing the equipment damaged by the storm.
But the Tom Mix Circus was beyond mending. Tom had been approached to make another tour of Europe.
His great popularity there had begun in 1915, when Aubert of France took over the distribution of a long list of his Selig films for exhibition on the Continent. Tom's pictures were huge money-makers in foreign countries for years after that and were still doing splendidly. He was the personification of the Great Good Western Man to millions of European youngsters as well as to millions of American junior cowboys.
That first European personal appearance tour of his was a great success. The enthusiastic followers that gathered at Le Havre to meet his ship could not restrain their joy when Tom, dressed in one of his brilliant cowboy outfits, rode down the unloading ramp of the steamer on his horse and pressed right into the crowds. He literally entered Europe on horseback, a very fitting act for the most famous cowboy in the world. He was delayed there by the besieging crowd for almost four hours before they released him to catch a train to Paris where he was to do his first European show.
In Paris he rode in the streets for hours while the fans lined the boulevards and cheered him; and of course his performance there had been sold out for weeks in advance. It was like that in every European capital he played.
There was every indication that the financial success of the tour proposed in 1938 would be every bit as overwhelming as that of the first one. It looked like a sure way for Tom to step out I of his financial bog.
"I think it's the best thing to do," Tom told Ruth. "We can get our debts cleared off-and then we can start fresh again."
For the circus was floundering in debt by then. Ever since it had twice been almost totally destroyed- first by the mob in Montana and then by the tornado in Wisconsin- Tom's efforts to get on his feet had been stymied in every direction.
"Of course," he told Ruth, "I won't make the tour unless you come along."
Ruth was thrilled with the idea and she and Tom were busy making plans from then on. While the agents were at work making the final arrangements for the tour, Tom was planning to put the circus in cold storage until his profits from the foreign tour enabled him to retire all existing obligations against the show and then resume on a debt-free basis. Ruth thought everything was settled.
Then one night after they concluded a performance in an old town in New England, Tom showed up at Ruth's trailer looking pale and distraught. At that moment he seemed old for the first time in his life.
"Will you go for a drive with me, Ruth?" he said in a voice that was strangely quavering. "I know it's late and I know you're tired, but I think I've got to talk to you tonight."
"Why, of course," she said.
They drove about a mile out of town to a Revolutionary War cemetery that rolled down from a verdant knoll to an ancient river. It was a beautiful, peaceful night with a full moon making a silvered tracery of the riverbank trees in the water. But Ruth was nervously watching Tom's ashen face and his restless dark eyes.
They sat down on the riverbank and Tom turned to face Ruth. "I've sure made a botch of things for us, haven't I?" he said.
"Don't talk like that," Ruth said quietly. "We have everything to look forward to now. The European tour will solve all our problems."
"I'm not so sure," Tom said in a strained voice. "I'm not so sure."
Ruth leaned toward him and put her hand on his arm. "Dad, what's wrong?" If you've given up hope, why there's just no hope for any of us."
He tried to smile. "I don't think I'm a very good one for giving hope to anyone," he said. "It seems a little fantastic that I've reached this stage of fife only to end up a failure."
Ruth twisted uncomfortably. "A failure? After what you've given the world? How can you even think that?"
"A personal failure," he said. "I've failed my family. And in doing that I've failed myself."
Ruth tried to protest. "Circumstances were against the family life you really wanted," she said.
"They didn't have to be," he returned. "When you were a baby, Ruth, I kept thinking that one day we'd be living in our own little world, as a family should. But I kept putting off that day until it was suddenly too late."
Ruth remonstrated. "Why think about something that can't be done over, Dad?" She took his hand in hers affectionately. "There's the future. You've always thought about the future-remember?"
This ebbing out of the inner feelings that had been accumulating in Tom for years was as difficult for Ruth as it was for him. All his life he had secluded his troubles deep within himself, refusing to share them even with those closest to him. But now he had reached a point where his need for understanding overpowered his desire not to hurt others. He had tallied his life and concluded that he had lost somewhere his own touch with happiness and with it the ability to make others happy.
"Sure, there's always the future," he agreed, trying to smile and not quite managing. "But when you reach a certain point... well, the future is compounded of the past too." He straightened a little. "Where I've failed, I'm sure you can carry on, Ruth."
She was silent, but she did not understand the significance of that remark right then.
Tom stood up and looked down at her. "Ruth, I guess there's one thing about life that keeps us tough and urges us on, and that's doing things we don't want to do. I hope you'll remember that in the morning." He turned his face away. "I think I need to be alone for a few minutes. Think I'll take a little walk."
"All right," said Ruth quietly. "I'll be waiting here."
She watched him as he walked up the slope, through the cemetery, and into a wood of ancient trees. She waited . . . and waited. It seemed as though hours passed before she heard a car start with a muffled blast of its exhaust.
Ruth ran up the slope and found that her father, in his distraught condition, had simply forgotten she was there. Or had he? Anyway, he had driven away alone.
On her mile walk back to town, she cried all the way. She felt that she had been completely inadequate in her attempt to help her father in the greatest moment of stress in his life. She had a feeling that their talk had been abortive. There was so much more that needed to be said. Yet when she reached the circus grounds and went to Tom's trailer, she found him deep in a sleep of emotional exhaustion. She did not awaken him. Slipping quietly away, she went to her own trailer. In the morning, she felt, they would continue their talk, and this time she would find some way to help her father get his perspective in focus again.
But in the morning Tom was gone.
Through blurring eyes, she read the note he had left for her:
Some day he would come back, she thought, with his future resolved and his strength reborn in him.
Tom eventually did come back from Europe. But that night on the bank of a quiet New England river was the last time Ruth ever saw her father alive.
Olive Stokes Mix, with Eric Heath, The Fabulous Tom Mix, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc.), 1957, pages 157-171.
© 1999, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)
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